My Blog List

Friday, 29 June 2012

It is sixteen years since more than 1,250 inmates were gunned down at Abu Salim gaol
in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, but this is the first time the Libyan people
have been able to mark the anniversary.

The prisoners were killed on June 28 and 29, 1996 for protesting to
demand better conditions.Colonel
Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, Abdullah al-Senussi, who is now under
arrest, is accused of ordering the massacre.

While the Gaddafi regime was in power, victims’ families did not dare
mark the anniversary, but now the prison has been turned into a museum where
visitors can seen pictures of those killed, secret notes written by inmates and
other objects from the notorious history of Abu Salim, where some were held for
many years.

Although many old scores are being settled by the gun in
post-revolutionary Libya, the judiciary has started prosecuting members of the
former government.Mr Senussi, is
wanted by the International Criminal Court, but is currently being held by the
Mauritanian authorities who have charged him with entering the country
illegally.

Thursday, 28 June 2012

After some of the heaviest rain Bangladesh has suffered in years, floods
and landslides have killed at least 70 people, and left another 200,000
homeless.Eighteen inches of rain are said to have fallen
in the port of Chittagong in just 24 hours.

At least 15 people died there, while another 30 perished in Bandarban to
the south-east.The authorities fear
more people may be trapped under mud, and rescue efforts are continuing to
find and free them.

In Sylhet in the north-east of the country, house roofs are three feet
beneath the water, and local people have had to scramble up onto high ground,
or take refuge in boats.Districts
around the capital, Dhaka, have also been inundated.

A monsoon flood in Bangladesh is said to have killed nearly 29,000 in
1974, though some of these may have perished in the famine that followed.It happened less than four years after the deadliest
cyclone in history killed perhaps half a million of its people.

Sunday, 17 June 2012

Thirteen
prisoners have been killed in a fire in a gaol in south-east Turkey’s Sanliurfa
province.Another five have been
injured.

According
to some reports, prisoners set fire to their bedding in a protest, though this
has been denied by the governor.It
took firefighters an hour and a half to put the blaze out.An MP from the pro-Kurdish Peace and
Democracy Party was among the prison’s inmates, but is not believed to have
been hurt.

This
year saw what was probably the deadliest prison fire in history at the Comayagua Penitentiary in Honduras, where 360
people were killed in February including inmates’ spouses on conjugal visits.

The cause of the Honduras fire is still unclear,
with the authorities talking about an electrical fault while some survivors
said an inmate started it.Critics
complained that Comayagua was overcrowded.

Friday, 15 June 2012

More than 10 years
after the attack on the World Trade Centre, New Yorkers are still developing
illnesses that may be related to the disaster.In 2004, the original fund for the injured and bereaved was closed after
paying out $7 billion.

The collapse of
the buildings had released a toxic cloud
of glass fibres, asbestos, lead, pulverised cement and assorted carcinogens,
but just days after, the Environmental Protection Agency said the air in lower
Manhattan was safe.

As people
continued to fall ill, in 2010, the fund was reopened, but it did not cover cancer.Firemen, police officers and former pupils
at a school near the site are among those who have been diagnosed, but it is
hard to prove their illnesses are directly related to the disaster.

In March, an
advisory committee suggested cancer should be covered, but it is not clear for
how long this would extend.As
with Hiroshima and Chernobyl, for some, it might be years more before tumours
appear.There are also complaints that victims of
other American disasters, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and Hurricane
Katrina, were not nearly so generously compensated.

Sunday, 3 June 2012

It’s
a long way from Chernobyl to Wales, but until this weekend there were still restrictions
on movement of sheep from more than 300 Welsh farms as a result of fall-out
from the nuclear disaster 26 years ago.

After
the explosion, radioactive particles became lodged in upland peat, and passed
to sheep grazing the land, so they had to be tested before they
could be sold.

At first, nearly 10,000 British farms were affected.Over the years this came down to 327 in
Wales and a further eight in England, and now these final restrictions have been
removed.

At Chernobyl itself, work has begun on
a huge new metal shelter to cover the stricken reactor. After the disaster on April 26, 1986, a
concrete ‘sarcophagus’ was hastily erected, but for years it has been
crumbling, allowing radiation to leak out. According to some estimates, the disaster cost
of up to 200,000 lives.

(See also my
blogs of April 4, 2009, March 14, 2011 and April 29, 2012)

Friday, 1 June 2012

Two convicted
war criminals have received long prison sentences.The former president of Liberia, Charles
Taylor, has been sent to gaol for 50 years for aiding and abetting rebels in
Sierra Leone during the civil war of 1991-2002.

The judge at The Hague acknowledged that Taylor had never set foot in
Sierra Leone, but declared he had ‘been
found responsible for aiding and abetting some of the most heinous crimes in
human history.’

The
former president backed rebels from the Revolutionary United Front, who killed
tens of thousands of people, employing a strategy of murder,
rape, and hacking off limbs. Taylor, who is 64, says he will
appeal.

Meanwhile, in Rwanda, Callixte Nzabonimana, a former youth minister, has
been found guilty by a court in Tanzania of genocide and other crimes during
the 100 days of madness in 1994, which saw 800,000 people murdered.He was imprisoned for life, but he too says
he will appeal.

About Me

Author of 'Storm: Nature and Culture', 'Flood: Nature and Culture','Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters','London's Disasters','The Disastrous History of London' ('Capital Disasters' in hardback), 'A Disastrous History of Britain', 'A Disastrous History of the World', 'Disaster! A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues and Other Catastrophes', and 'Shutdown. Anatomy of a Shipyard Closure.' Producer/director of more
than 40 tv documentaries. Former radio producer. Freelance writer for publications such as the Guardian, Independent, Daily Express, Observer, New Statatesman. Freelance communications consultant and adviser. http://www.disasterhistorian.com/